As we all know, subtraction isn’t the easiest of concepts for our kiddos to digest. We go right from teaching them how to add to blowing their minds with subtraction. While we might feel like it should be a seamless transition, it just isn’t. I would go as far as to say that it is one of the toughest concepts to teach a 5 and 6 year old. Regardless of how difficult it is for them to grasp the concept, we have to stretch our teacher brains to help them really find ways to remember what subtraction means.
One of my favorite mnemonics is the “minus mustache”. We say it all the time when we are working with subtraction. All we do it take our finger and put it over our lip and say that we need to wear our minus mustache for this problem. I’ve said it for years, but this year I wanted to come up with an actual game or visual to go along with the whole “minus mustache” concept.
That’s where this whole idea of playing a game with mustaches and minus signs came from.
I used double sided tape and cut out these mustache minus problems for kids to wear.
Today, all I did was let the kids have a mustache and partner up and practice. It really was just an informal “Hey, let’s play a fun math game!” kind of activity. I first had them answer their subtraction problem before I gave it to them. They had to know the answer to their problem before they could start going around answering other problems and then telling others that they were right or wrong.
Since we are fresh in to subtraction, I also just gave them minus 0 and 1 for now. There are so many ways we can play this game and use it to practice for the rest of the year. I also came up with a few other ways to play other than just walking around and answering the question, but that seemed to be all that we could handle at the time being 🙂Â
Another thought that I had to carry on the whole “minus mustache” idea is to group them and have them organize themselves in to a minus mustache subtraction problem. This would obviously be a version of the game that we would play later in the year because it takes group work and understanding that the larger number goes first in a subtraction problem. Also, students would have to change roles and I know we aren’t quite ready for this version of the game, but I like having it in my back pocket to whip out in the Spring!
We all know that subtraction is a labor of love and takes more than just a 2 week unit to teach it. I start talking about subtraction and teaching it before we actually have lessons on it and I continue to talk about it and we work on it until the end of the year. I’m excited to have this game now because there are various ways to play it and I’ve also included some recording pages so it could also be a math tub if you wanted it to be!
It’s kind of amazing the possibilities that double sided tape has! My kids had the best time today playing this game and I can’t wait to use it more throughout the year!
Snag this unit on sale throughout the rest of the week!
